A Combined Reference Model- and View-Based Approach to System Specification

Abstract

The idea of a combined reference model- and view-based specification approach has been proposed recently in the software engineering community. In this paper we present a specification technique based on graph transformations which supports such a development approach. The use of graphs and graph transformations supports an intuitive understanding and an integration of static and dynamic aspects on a well-defined semantical base. On this background, formal notions of view and view relation are developed and the behaviour of views is described by a loose semantics. The integration of two views derived from a common reference model is done in two steps. First, dependencies between the views which are not given by the reference model are determined, and the reference model is extended appropriately. This is the task of a model manager. If the two views and the reference model are consistent, the actual view integration can be performed automatically. For the case of more than two views more general scenarios are developed and discussed. All concepts and results are illustrated at the well-known example of a banking system.